Wait, What?

Last May, the opening scene I edited raised a lot of questions – about the characters, their relationships, their backstory – without answering them right away. Of course, no opening scene can tell you everything at once, but this one put questions out there and then moved on, leaving readers hanging. This led one commentator to ask about ambiguity and what to do about it.

A quick survey of writing about writing shows that most of the advice you get on ambiguity is on how to get rid of it. I’m not so sure this is wise. Ambiguity can often be a powerful storytelling tool.

Understand, I’m not talking about misdirection, where your readers think they know what’s going on but eventually discover that you’ve been misleading them. And I’m not talking about clear plot questions that readers don’t yet know the answer to – “whodunit” is not a matter of ambiguity. I’m talking about the kind of scenes were readers have no idea what the scene means or why it’s in the book, and the writer knows that readers will feel that way.

You often have no choice but to include some ambiguity in your opening scene, especially if you’ve created a complex world or characters with full, interesting histories. The alternative is to try to convey all that background before the story begins—and weigh down your hook with a lot of exposition. It’s usually much better to simply trust that your readers will keep reading even if they don’t understand everything that’s going on.

Last February, we looked at a YA story set in Ghana, in which the narrator’s mother cooked a chicken that the narrator had considered a pet. One comment raised the question of why the mother did this. I pointed out that the rest of the village also seemed to be involved in the meal, which meant that the mother’s motives probably involved a skein of social obligations that western readers wouldn’t understand without a lot of explanation. But getting into the weeds of the mother’s decision at that moment would have drawn attention away from the narrator’s reaction to losing her chicken, which was the emotional core of the scene. The author had little choice but to leave the mother’s motives up in the air for the time being.

In trying to avoid this kind of thing, writers often choose an opening scene that is entirely self-contained and clear. And this can sometimes work. But it often means avoiding what’s most interesting about your world in your opener, since the things that make your world unique are also the things that make it engaging. Besides, you can often draw readers into your story if you leave them wondering just a bit about what’s going on. This is particularly true in science fiction and fantasy, where readers don’t expect to understand everything right away, or in spy thrillers, where readers expect that things won’t make sense until all is revealed.

In fact, it’s often possible to use ambiguity as a source of tension throughout an entire novel, leading readers to want to read through to the end just to understand what’s going on. There’s some risk to this approach, since you are generating tension from how your story is structured rather than the things that are happening to your characters. This kind of meta-tension can remind your readers that they’re reading a book. But if your story is strong enough in other ways, readers are willing to forgive you the manipulation, since they know the payoff will be worth it. (Note: my editor-wife, a voracious reader, disputes this point – she always resents the manipulation. So this technique won’t work for all readers.) Threading together all of the various enigmatic scenes into a coherent whole is one of the things (in addition to characters who are in constant peril for their lives) that drives Dan Brown readers through to the end. (Ruth notes there’s a reason she’s only read one Dan Brown novel.)

“Story of Your Life,” the Ted Chang novella that was the basis for the movie “Arrival,” opens with a woman, Louise, telling her daughter the story of her life. [SPOILERS] The scenes of Louise and her daughter are then interspersed through the narrative of how Louise, a linguist, was recruited to translate the language of aliens who have just arrived on earth. Readers have no idea what the story of her daughter — whom, we learn, dies young of cancer — has to do with unraveling the language of the floating, seven-footed octopus-like creatures. I know I kept waiting for her grief about her daughter to change how she felt about the aliens.

It’s not until the final few scenes that the two threads of the story come together and make sense. The aliens don’t perceive time sequentially – they are aware of everything that happens, all at once. As Louise becomes fluent in their language, she also begins to detach from time, remembering things that have not yet happened. And in the last couple of paragraphs, we learn that one of these things is the life and death of her daughter. What we thought were memories are in fact memories of events that haven’t occurred yet.

The reason this risky approach works is that Chang delivers enough other interesting elements that readers are willing to put up with not knowing the meaning of what they’re reading. Louise is wonderfully sympathetic, and her daughter is a delight. And the description of the situation with the aliens and the fight to penetrate their language makes it clear that readers are in the hands of a gifted storyteller. All of this make them more willing to suspend understanding.

Of course, it’s possible to go overboard with this approach. I’m currently working on a story told primarily from the point of view of a psychologically disturbed teenager, raised by a mother who is literally insane. The daughter is not really aware of her mother’s madness and takes her homelife as normal – hence the psychological disturbance. In the first draft, the author tried to capture the young girl’s skewed consciousness through a series of ambiguous scenes, colored by the girl’s confusion about her life and her mother’s pathology. But these scenes were so ambiguous – it was often hard to tell whether something actually happened or was a hallucination – that the story was impossible to follow. Readers not only didn’t understand what events meant. They didn’t understand what the events were. Readers will not put up with that for very long.

In the end, creating tension with ambiguity is pretty advanced storytelling. To use it effectively, you have to be tuned in to how your writing comes across to your readers. That’s the only way to confuse them just enough to keep them intrigued without driving them away. You also need to give your readers reason to put up with not being able to follow everything that’s going on. But working on your side, you’ve got the human need to make sense of things. That need is one of the reasons we tell stories in the first place.

Wish you could buy this author a cup of joe?

Dave King is the co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a best-seller among writing books. An independent editor since 1987, he is also a former contributing editor at Writer's Digest. Many of his magazine pieces on the art of writing have been anthologized in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing and in The Writer's Digest Writing Clinic. You can check out several of his articles and get other writing tips on his website.

It’s actually a novella in a collection of short stories. I found and read them because the reviews of the movie recommended how good they are. And they are — Chang has a unique and fertile imagination.

One reason I read WU regularly, even though my novel is waiting impatiently behind my highest-priority WIP (a nonfiction work based on scrupulous research) is that I can eventually improve the novel-to-be while immediately enriching the nonfiction work with fictional techniques. Keeping the reader hooked, intrigued, and compulsively reading is one of my major goals as I construct a narrative that could easily be merely informative. I am haunted by the mental image of readers yawning and putting my book aside in favor of a more gripping read. Even though “creating tension with ambiguity” is “pretty advanced storytelling,” I can see elements of my material that will lend themselves to that very tension. Thanks, Dave.

I love that you used “Arrival” as an example here. I saw and loved the movie, but I had to make a conscious choice to set aside my need to understand certain things in order to stay in the moment with it. The characters and their passions for language, for one another, made this do-able. And the overarching theme (or what I perceived to be one, in which human nature displays its spectrum, from nobility to blind hubris), while not blatant, was a cohesive factor in this amazing story. I’m going to read this a few more times, then print it out and ponder meta-tension. Thank you, Dave, for an eye-opening morning.

I didn’t get into the weeds on this in the article, but Chang really needed to structure the story the way he did. The reveal of the story is that Louise does detach from time as she learns to think in the alien language. But that revelation opens up all sorts of questions about how free will operates when the future is as fixed as the past. By showing how she relates to the tragic story of her daughter, Chang shows readers how to live as a human with that sort of consciousness before they realize that’s what they’re learning. When the revelation comes, everything readers have learned from watching Louise and her daughter snaps into place.

By the way, the story is different in key respects from the movie. There is no military threat in the story, no bombing, Abbot is not death process. Not that I’m complaining about the changes. Movies have different needs than books.

Reading this article brought to mind a sci-fi novel Brother Termite by Patricia Anthony. The opening scene shows a man in the White House looking out on some kind of confrontation going on in the streets of Washington D.C. The reader doesn’t know who this man is, or what is happening, only gets a sense of dire circumstances surrounding it all. Only at the end of the first chapter, does the reader find out that the man is an alien, and then the conflict between humans and aliens is slowly explained in the next few chapters. I am not a fan of sci-fi or fantasy, but the opening of this book drew me in. Much the same way the opening of “The Terminator” drew me in.

I’m with your wife on this, Dave. Too much ambiguity at the beginning is a real turn-off. I gave up on Autumn by Ali Smith after a few pages–you don’t find out for a while what’s actually happening in this bizarre first section. Then one of my book groups chose it, so I struggled through the rest. There were a few good bits but I’d have been better off not picking it up again. And, yes, I’ve only read one Dan Brown book and no desire to read another. Obviously both authors have many sales, so there must be plenty of readers who don’t mind it.

Thank you for this essay! I was intrigued by the film “Arrival” and it led me to read the novella “Story of Your Life,” by Ted Chang. From there I was pointed to Jacques Lacan the French psychoanalyst who studied and applied linguistics to his work. The Q’eros (descendants of the Inca) believe the future is behind us. Time is fluid, flowing through us. I just finished a long overdue re-read of The Sound and the Fury (Time and watches are theme and motif) and Faulkner certainly leaves the reader wondering what is going on, and for that matter who is speaking. I recommend it.

I hadn’t connected Chang’s work with Faulkner, but now that you mention it . . . yes! It’s even more true of As I Lay Dying, where a character who is dead suddenly gets a POV chapter in the middle of the book.